“[Men] might pretend they want one of these bimbas but they don’t really. They want a nice friend.”
— “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason”

I asked my friend Sam, the smartest guy I know, why he liked his partner, Marie. This is the story he told me:

“Every once in a great while — particularly during periods of shared stress — she’ll decree it’s time for us to once more spend the entire evening playing one incredibly loud, raucous song after another on the stereo and dancing around the living room of our house on Canfield, singing along and shouting along and playing air guitar and generally enjoying making fools of ourselves. We take turns, each picking one song at a time. Sometimes Stevie Wonder gives way to Waylon Jennings, followed by Black Uhuru and then Led Zeppelin.”

I stared. He shrugged.

“It’s cathartic.”

We girls spend hours of our lives trying to please men in ways we think they want to be pleased. We plump up our tits, we Stairmaster our asses, we clip and shave and clothe and perfume. What I spend on my hair alone could feed a third-world village for a month, and don’t get me started on the cost of decent lingerie these days.

We worry about what to say to them, whether we’ve said the wrong things, started the wrong conversations, called them too often, called them too rarely, bought them lousy Christmas gifts, dragged them to too many chick flicks.